SQL has a lexical and a logical order of SELECT clauses. The lexical order of SELECT clauses is inspired by the English language. As SQL statements are commands for the database, it is natural to express a statement in an imperative tense, such as "SELECT this and that!".

Some "higher-level" abstractions, such as C#'s LINQ or Scala's SLICK try to inverse the lexical order of SELECT clauses to what appears to be closer to the logical order. The obvious advantage of moving the SELECT clause to the end is the fact that the projection type, which is the record type returned by the SELECT statement can be re-used more easily in the target environment of the internal domain specific language.

While this looks like a good idea at first, it only complicates translation to more advanced SQL statements while impairing readability for those users that are used to writing SQL. jOOQ is designed to look just like SQL. This is specifically true for SLICK, which not only changed the SELECT clause order, but also heavily "integrated" SQL clauses with the Scala language.

For these reasons, the jOOQ DSL API is modelled in SQL's lexical order.